As you can see, progress is being made each and every day. Electric was taken care of one day, and now you can see that sheetrock and spackle have been put up. Check back on Thursday once the painters are finished and we’re on our way to Saturday, for Stef’s birthday party!
After the other day’s recollection of opportunities missed, it feels good to sit down today and report about a most excellent dining experience the wife and I enjoyed the other day. After picking my snowboard up from the Board Shop we stopped into the former site of Fonda Coyoacan, which Stefani and I never got to enjoy.
El Picacho Catracho is owned by two, young Huntington mill workers, one of whom hails from Honduras. It was a desire to taste this regional cuisine that El Picacho Catracho was born. As there are no authentic Honduran restaurants on Long Island, the two went into another business together, serving some of the tastiest, freshly prepared Latin food.
If it’s bought in, it’s from Honduras, otherwise everything served in this place is freshly prepared. The chips and salsa are neither bagged nor jarred and are totally addictive. We quickly finished our little snack before we jumped head first into Honduran specialties. Freshly prepared seafood soup was more than enough for two people and was full of shrimp, crab, lobster and locally sourced clams. Easily the best seafood soup we’ve had, and this is one of those dishes that we get everywhere we travel, totally trumping Cafe Jose in Montreal. Baleadas Picacho, handmade white flour tortillas filled with chorizo, avocado, beef, eggs, cheese and beans were tasty and filling as were the tacos with fresh relish and salsa.
We enjoyed our meal with freshly prepared horchata, or semilla de jicaro as it is known in Honduras. So much better than the rice horchatas served elsewhere, this milky beverage is made with ground jicaro seeds.
All in all, El Picacho Catracho is one of the best authentic, Latin cuisine experiences that we’ve had and we’re glad they’re so close.
Here’s a link to their menu:
El Picacho
1026 New York Ave.
Huntington Station, NY 11746
(631) 683-4224
Check out our brand new door!
Knocking down that wall between the kitchen and the dining room really opened up the place.
No turning back now peoples. We are underway with our kitchen renovation and progress is being made. I met Eric and Lou this morning at Home Depot and came home this afternoon and found this:
I’d like to begin this post with the following statement; food writers can’t love every restaurant they visit. They can’t love every dish they’re served. There are some dogs out there people, and you deserve to hear about them. Not to go so far as to bash or degrade anyone; no negative energy here, thank you, but I do feel as though it is terribly suspect when every review is a great review.It bothers me so much that once, in October, I wrote an email to a publication that has a food column and asked them if they’d ever had a meal that they didn’t like. Here’s the response I got from their publisher:
Now, I really can’t argue with the “small business” angle, but maybe there’s a way we can come off as seeming less like, “Invite us for a free meal at your restaurant, and we’ll write a great review.” This is like those community newspapers that let you write your own “editorial” if you buy a big enough piece of advertising, somewhere in the edition.
Thank you for letting me get this off my chest.
Now, I really wanted to like Pumpernickels. I mean, it has all the pedigree of a great German restaurant; waitresses dressed like the St. Paulie girl, gigantic German beers and a continuous operation at the same Northport location for over 30 years. This is what I’m looking for, and this is what I got. I figured that with these credentials, the German grub would be fresh and delicious. It hurts to overlook some of the less tasty bits such as the smoked salmon and the Wiener Schnitzel á la Holstein that was begging for a pan reduction sauce of some kind. My wife said that her sauerbraten was just “eh,” and following the meal it was disheartening to hear that none of the deserts were made fresh in house except for a rice pudding which cried for sugar.
Not to say that the entire experience was a bust. I still have passing thoughts about the crab salad appetizer my father-in-law ordered (who didn’t even argue as I invaded his dish with my fork) and the potato pancakes were excellent, but I’m not gonna say that there there weren’t a few hiccups that left me with a “what just happened” kind of feeling. I will definitely try Pumpernickels again, but I’m going in a little more focused than I was the first time.
Pumpernickels
640 Main St.
Northport, NY 11768
(631) 757-7959
